Waste Reduction Week Ideas for Home

Waste Reduction always starts and ends in the household, and some of the easiest changes can happen here. Your home is a great opportunity to try some new ideas for waste reduction and see what works for you! find out more at shuttercraft.co.uk about the best Window Shutters.

Start Your Compost Bin

Composting is one of the best methods for reducing unnecessary waste. Food scraps in the landfill creates harmful greenhouse gasses, and so choosing instead to compost is a great alternative. And don’t worry! Composting can occur in the winter as well. If you’re interested in composting, we have two greatworkshops available to check out in the coming weeks to get you started.

This Waste Reduction Week, challenge yourself by signing up to our backyard composting workshop, or check out our how-to guide on starting a compost option. Get in touch with our composting hotline at 204-925-3777 (866-394-8880) if you have any questions or need some tips!

Choose Eco-Friendly Cleaning Products

Cleaning products and other household products are a great opportunity to be critical and choose sustainable alternatives. Changing over to eco-friendly products may be challenging though. How can you be sure that those green products are actually “green”? Luckily, the Environmental Working Group has got your back with this handy report that ranks cleaning products. Or, you can try to make it yourself! We have tons of DIY recipes you can try out. That way, you can ensure you know what is going into your products…and they’re often cheaper than the in-store alternative!

This Waste Reduction Week, challenge yourself by performing an audit on your currently owned cleaning products and if they rank low, see what product you can purchase or make on your next trip to the store.

Go Plastic Free

Plastic Free July may have come and gone for the year, but that doesn’t mean that those resources can’t be used for October! Take Waste Reduction Week as an opportunity to reduce your plastic. Some specific ideas that you can try:

This Waste Reduction Week, challenge yourself by choosing a plastic free option from the list above, or from Plastic Free July’s Action Picker and commit to implementing this option for the week (or longer)

Do Your Own Waste Audit

This one can be a little messy, but a household waste audit is an extremely valuable learning experience.

The basic principle of a waste audit is to empty all waste and recycle bins in your household, then collect your discards over 24-hours as normal. Instead of throwing the discards out, take it and separate it (preferably outside and on a tarp or something that can be washed afterward) by bin. Take a look and see what was thrown into a garbage bin that is actually recyclable, what could be composted, and what your household tends to discard a lot of. Not quite sure what can be recycled in Manitoba? Check out Recycle Manitoba to search for those questionable items and see just where it should go.

This Waste Reduction Week, challenge yourself to a waste audit, collect your discards and critically determine what changes you can make in your waste habits. If you have any questions or want to follow up on your audit, get in touch with us and we’d be happy to help!

Challenge Your Children to Reduce Waste

School and play and sports and work and dinners…raising kids can be a lot of work! It’s also a great opportunity to introduce waste reduction in a fun and easy way. We recommend trying a 7-day waste reduction challenge, and it can easily be adapted from Going Zero Waste’s 31-Day Zero Waste Challenge!

2 Comments

Lorna Broadfoot
on November 9, 2017 at 11:42 am

Our community is having a waste management meeting next week. would you have handouts to provide for our guests, encouraging the changes identified under Waste Management week?

Thanks for getting in touch! We have a few things you may find useful:
– littlerless lunch one-page handout
– various handouts promoting workplace greening and sustainable commuting presentations and our Go Manitoba app
– backyard composting and vermicomposting how-to pamphlets
– information on our ON SITE multi-family composting for apartment and condo buildings in Winnipeg

What community are you in?
If you contact info@greenactioncentre.ca the staff person monitoring that email line will be able to arrange things with you (feel free to copy this message there).